Welcome to the Cato Daily Podcast with Anastasia Glova.

Today is Monday, May 7th.

In the Cato study, the perfect firestorm, bringing Forest Service wildfire costs

under control, Senior Fellow Randall O'Toole outlines Congress's wasteful spending on wildfire

containment at the Forest Service.

Randall talks about his findings in today's podcast.

You've written a Cato study on wildfire management at the Forest Service.

What is the problem that you've identified?

Well Congress doesn't know how to fund wildfire protection and so it has given the

Forest Service a virtual blank check and as a result Forest Service

Firefighting money is going out of control. They're just spending more and more each

year. They've quintupled their annual expenditures in the last 15 years and that has two problems.

First of all is costing taxpayers a lot of money.

And second of all, it has come to dominate everything that the Forest Service does

so that ordinary National Forest Management for Recreation and Wildlife and Watershed and

other resources is becoming subservient to wildfire.

But aren't wildfires very dangerous and it's in our very serious interest to try to curtail?

Actually wildfires are a natural part of the forest and many rural people and many rural

parts of the world have used fire for centuries for millennia to help them manage the forest.

It's rather a natural part of rural land management, both farmers and foresters and others

use fire, but the Forest Service was given a literal blank check in

1908 to put out wildfire by Congress.

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